AI can replicate human creativity in two key ways – but falls apart when asked to provide something truly latest

Is computational creativity possible? The recent hype around generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools comparable to ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E and lots of others, raises latest questions on whether creativity is a uniquely human skill. Some recent and memorable milestones of generative AI foster this query:

• An AI artwork, , sold for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate, by the auction house Christie’s in 2018. The artwork was created by a generative adversarial network that was fed an information set of 15,000 portraits covering six centuries.

• Music producers comparable to Grammy-nominee Alex Da Kid, have collaborated with AI (on this case IBM’s Watson) to churn out hits and inform their creative process.

In the cases above, a human remains to be on the helm, curating the AI’s output in keeping with their very own vision and thereby retaining the authorship of the piece. Yet, AI image generator Dall-E, for instance, can produce novel output on any theme you want inside seconds. Through diffusion, whereby huge datasets are scraped together to coach the AI, generative AI tools can now transpose written phrases into novel pictures or improvise music within the kind of any composer, devising latest content that resembles the training data but isn’t similar. Authorship on this case is probably more complex. Is it the algorithm? The hundreds of artists whose work has been scraped to provide the image? The prompter who successfully describes the style, reference, material, lighting, viewpoint and even emotion evoked? To answer these questions, we must return to an age-old query.

What is creativity?

According to Margaret Boden, there are three varieties of creativity: combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity. Combinational creativity combines familiar ideas together. Exploratory creativity generates latest ideas by exploring ‘structured conceptual spaces,’ that’s, tweaking an accepted kind of considering by exploring its contents, boundaries and potential. Both of most of these creativity are usually not 1,000,000 miles from generative AI’s algorithmic production of art; creating novel works in the identical style as thousands and thousands of others within the training data, a ‘synthetic creativity.’ Transformational creativity, nonetheless, means generating ideas beyond existing structures and styles to create something entirely original; that is at the guts of current debates around AI when it comes to fair use and copyright – very much unchartered legal waters, so we may have to attend and see what the courts determine.

The key characteristic of AI’s creative processes is that the present computational creativity is systematic, not impulsive, as its human counterpart can often be. It is programmed to process information in a certain strategy to achieve particular results predictably, albeit in often unexpected ways. In fact, this is probably probably the most significant difference between artists and AI: while artists are self- and product-driven, AI could be very much consumer-centric and market-driven – we only get the art we ask for, which just isn’t perhaps, what we’d like.

So far, generative AI seems to work best with human partners and, perhaps then, the synthetic creativity of the AI is a catalyst to push our human creativity, augmenting human creativity somewhat than producing it. As is commonly the case, the hype around these tools as disruptive forces outstrips the fact. In fact, art history shows us that technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they desired to do. Think of the camera, for instance, which was feared as a result of its power to place portrait painters out of business. What are the business implications for the usage of synthetic creativity by AI, then?

Synthetic art for business

Synthetic creativity on demand, as currently generated by AI, is definitely a boon to business and marketing. Recent examples include:

The potential use scenarios are countless and what they require is one other type of creativity: curation. AI has been known to ‘hallucinate’ – an industry term for spewing nonsense – and the decidedly human skill required is in sense-making, that’s expressing concepts, ideas and truths, somewhat than simply something that is pleasant to the senses. Curation] is due to this fact needed to pick and frame, or reframe, a unified and compelling vision.